Cats are everywhere in the cities adjacent to water in southeastern Europe – in the countries of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and now Montenegro.  Most recently I was in Dubrovnik.

You cannot miss them.  There have to be 100s of cats for every dog that I have seen.  And the cats appear to be all stray feral cats.  None of them are being led around on a leash during their daily walk by their master.

Why?  I asked this question everywhere I went.  The answer was loud, clear and uniform – to get rid of the rats.  And it has worked.  Not a person said there was any kind of ongoing rat problem in any city that I visited.

This raises the obvious question of why we aren’t doing this in the USA.

It turns out that Chicago, which has the largest rat population of any city in America, has a program that has been working for years now. CNN’s health reporter Jen Christensen reported in 2016 that Chicago had found the answer to its staggering rat problem –

by introducing feral cats into a building, area, or neighborhood that was under rat infestation. The program called “Cats at Work” is managed by Tree House Humane Society, a non profit feral cat shelter.

However, New York City’s rat problems have been getting headlines over the last months.  So serious are the rat problems that Mayor Eric Adams has created a new executive position in his administration of Rat Czar (director of rodent mitigation), and he has appointed Kathleen Corradi to lead the onslaught on rats in the country’s largest city.

Isn’t the solution very simple – namely, populate the city with cats, lots of cats.  Won’t that take care of the problem.  It has in southeastern Europe.

This seems so simple.  What am I missing?

I hope that my readers will chime in on this one.  What am I missing?

Ian, my grandson and travel buddy for the last two weeks, told me something that I did not know, something that shocked me.  He said that cats are a huge concern for our environment because they are one of the biggest killers of other wildlife.

Scientific American in 2016 concluded that cats are the number one invasive killer of species around the world. They stated “according to research published this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, feral cats can be blamed for 63 modern-day extinctions. That’s 40 bird species, 21 mammals and 2 reptiles, or 26 percent of extinctions for those categories.”

Another Scientific American article almost 10 years ago talked about “ruthless cats” and pointed out that one third of cats kill 2 animals each week on an average. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has in the past listed domestic cats in the top 100 World’s Worst Invasive Alien Species for their ability to decimate prey populations.  This does not even include feral cats.  In 2022 the Polish Academy of Sciences added “domestic” cats to its list of invasive alien species.  Australia has had a serious feral cat population problem for years.

NBC Think’s Adam Larson reported that each year cats in the US kill an estimated 2.4 billion birds, 478 million reptiles, 173 million amphibians, and 12.3 billion mammals. Birds, lizards, frogs, snakes and rodents.  In fact researchers at the University of Georgia have argued that cats are cold blooded serial killers, killing for the sport of it.

On the other side of the coin, I just reacquainted myself with the health problems that rats cause and I practically fell off my chair.  Holy cow.

Sometimes in life you have to make tradeoffs.  This may be one of those times.